When transporting an amount of data, such as a file, from a sender to a receiver, it is known to provide for the sending of control messages from the sender to the receiver, and possibly of response control messages from the receiver to the sender, in order to control the process of communicating the amount of data. It is also known to arrange the control scheme of a receiver in such a way that it can operate in a plurality of operating modes, where there is at least one reception operating mode for receiving the above-mentioned amount of data in a transmission. The term “transmission” is used in a sense that there is a recognizable beginning and end of the data transfer.
In receivers that are arranged to operate with such a reception operating mode, there are typically further operating modes, e.g. at least an idle or stand-by mode which the receiver enters when there is no transmission underway. Naturally, there can be further operating modes, e.g. one or more error repair modes for repairing errors in the data received during the reception operating mode. The basic problem for receivers of this kind is to have a defined transition from one mode (or state) to another.
In connection with the transition from the reception operating mode into a different mode, it is known to provide end-of-transmission signaling from the sender to the receiver. In other words, the sender sends a predetermined message that tells the receiver that the transmission is over. As an example, in a data unit based communication, the final data unit of the transmission can contain a specific flag or information element that informs the receiver that the given data unit is the final data unit of the transmission. However, the sending of end-of transmission messages suffers from the problem that such messages could get lost in the course of the transmission, which leads to an undefined state at the receiver, in the sense that the receiver remains in the reception operating mode, although there is no more data to be received.